presumably the next grant they get (to continue their subsidised film-watching) will be to research if sad films make you melancholy and happy films make you happy.
some research departments simply have too much spare money
Just because the material doesn't break or tear, doen't mean that whatever is inside it won't. If you make body armour from it, you could still get your head blown off. Likewise if you make a tent from it, any explosion outside could still damage or kill anyone inside, simply because the material is flexible and will bend when hit by shrapnel.
The best thing to do with it would be to make bags that you can use to contain an explosive device rather than try to protect people with it.
Afterthought: if it's so tough, how do you machine it?
The key difference is that most criminals are stupid, while most consultants are much more intelligent. I would suggest that for a given IQ (or however you want to measure intelligence) the balance is far more in favour of the criminal than an equally IQ-endowed consultant.
The reason being that there are more opportunities to get money from a criminal activity than from a security consultancy activity and it will always be easier to exploit a weakness than to fix it.
So why aren't there more super-villains?
Because it's not about the money, it's about the life-style. No really intelligent person would want to spend the rest of their life looking over their shoulder. Neither would they be dumb enough to think they had committed the perfect (i.e. untraceable) crime
The obsession stems from the "great" tradition of british tabloid journalism. Essentially they build up a person or an institution and then knock them down. If one tabloid builds 'em up, the rest just love to criticise or undermine them. It's basically just a game between a group of immature personalities (I nearly said "journalists") that a group of the public play along with.
Some El Reg. writers have adopted this style (without realising that the tabloid audience doesn't read their publication), probably because they've never read a proper newspaper and don't know any better.
so much DRM, most data will be inaccessible
on
Security in Ten Years
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
in 10 years time so much of what we not take for granted will have been patented, copyrighted, DRMd, protected or licenced that the average net user will have much less access to information, and therefore much less reason to "surf".
We will have become used to having a small number of portals that provide the vast majority of the data we will be allowed to access (for a fee, of course) and security will have become the problem of these portals.
Users simply won't have much incentive to surf freely from site to site as there will be so little free data available. Therefore the sort of security issues we have today will have gone away. The problem in the future will be for providers (that's you amd me bloggers and other website owners) to prove to the portals that they are clean and meet the standards of the day.
If you tell me you 'need' a language to implement a website...
This is just word-inflation. in the same way that children nowadays "need" a chocolate bar.
In business, the best way to see if someone really "needs" something is to see how much hassle they're willing to suffer to get it. For example, if they need a $1000 product, then I'd need a 20 page justification. If they need to attend a conference in 'Vegas, I need them to work weekends to catch-up the time etc. You get the idea.
Wiping your disk is fine. But if you work in any sort of competant organisation (does that include government?) someone will be taking regular backups of your data.
You're about to learn what the business world is really like.
Or, depending on how the project lead is viewed in the company, this could be the fastest promotion you'll ever get.
Before you talk to anyone about this, do some discrete research about who might be sympathetic to your situation, who the lead's enemies are and think about just how much politics you want to get involved in
OK, this is a mischevious response, but let's see where it goes.
To summarise your position: someone in your company found some information on a forum and too advantage of it (presumbly without the authors permission). You are asking for advice on a forum and are hoping to take advantage of it, too.
Are you planning to get the permission of whoever's advice you use, before you use it?
P.S. You have my permission to use this post in your considerations.
All these "futuristic" interfaces fall foul of the "flying car" effect. In the past people expected that by now (well, by about 1980) we'd all have given up out automobiles for flying cars. These UIs are the computing equivalent - they take our current limited experiences and extrapolate them.
In practice anything that involves waving your arms around, a la Minority report will be the fastest way to get tired arms ever invented. So that's the Reactible, Multi-touch and Microsoft surface out of the running. Imaging doing that for an 8 hour shift in your datacentre. Completely impractical, but like flying cars, looks great to the uninformed.
Let's face it, typing is quicker than mousing - you've got 110 keys at your disposal instead of just 2 (or up to 5 - wow wee!!!) and the limitation is the number you can press is limited by the numberof fingers you can manipulate at once - not the numebr of things you can press. Just try writing a letter by mouse clicks. Typing is even quicker than speaking - especially when you have to go back and change the phonetically (sorry fonetically) spelled words that come out.
Personally, all I want from a UI is one that doesn't steal focus from my window to pop-up a "Shall I delete all your files Y / n" just when I think I'm, going to hit in a text window. It should keep the clutter off my screen and just show me the stuff I want. Aeroglass is nowhere near this (and probably going in the wrong direction anyway - far too complicated).
Let's just keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
and now the bad people have one: get their nukes (or at least the fissionable components) into the USA before these detectors get rolled out.
How long? let's see. if they're "developing" it now, say 3 years until it's in production and another year until it's at the major points of entry. But you've got to cover all the points of entry - sea, air(freight), land via Canada and Mexico. Make that about 10,000 PoE in all, so you're talking about another couple of years at least. That means about 6 years or until the beginning of 2014 to get a few grapefruit sized pieces of metal across the border.
Really bad thought: maybe it would be easier to get material that's already in US stockpiles - what use are border checks then?
you'd also have to specify a baseline hardware configuration (hint: Vista runs faster on a 10GHz QP + 16GB than XP does on a 1GHz, 512MB box)
As it is, no operating system has ever run faster than it's predecessor on the same hardware. Whether you're talking OS/360 (what's that grandad?), VMS, BSD/Sys5 Unixes, probably even linuxes - tho' there are so many variants, it's impossible to know for all of them.
If you already have a PC, you'll run XP (or in my case W2K SP4) 'cos it just works.
If you buy a new PC, you'll run Vista.
That's basically it. A few people will have bought a Vista upgrade - maybe they're ahppy with it, maybe not. If not, they'll either live with it or revert. It's not to do with competition, it's to do with a saturated market.
The only story here is: people sometimes buy new PCs.
Until there is a killer app that only runs on Vista, I can't see why most people whould make the change.
If you publish online information about your current (or past) job, that tells any future employers a lot about your sense of discretion and how you treat information that may not be overtly confidential, but certainly has no place in a public forum. Certainly the interviewer would be less than happy to find information about their company (or even this interview) on your next blog entry.
If you simply can't hold it in, at least make sure that no individuals or organisations can be identified.
On a resume, or in an interview, the potential employer is interested in what you can do for them, not your personal blog or your views on personal/irrelevant topics (unless they would be incompatible with the position you are interviewing for).
As a consequence, I can see almost no situations where an employee can write about their current or past work in a way that will not compromise their future employment prospects - leave online links out of your CV
Absolutley not. I interview a *lot* of people and I have never seen a CV (resume) that lists any nicknames, alter-egos, aliases or anything that would point to the candidate having any kind of online presence. It woud probably count against them if they thought this was important.
I certainly would never follow up any links to online data in a CV.
A lot of countries have anti-discrimination laws. You would be on very sticky ground if you rejected a candidate on the grounds of information you had gleaned online (esp. if it was related to a class of discrimination). For instance if someone's online diary said "I plan to start a family in a year or two" You could not ask this type of question in an interview and if you rejected them by knowing that this was their intention you could end up being sued.
Wait does the guy in the video arm that fucking bomb?
No, it's a training "dummy" that was used by the RAF until they had them taken away in the 90's. Now the only nukes the brits have are in trident submarines, which they have to buy from the americans.
let's have green CPU fans, green memory, green chassis (made from wood?), green power plugs, green keyboards, green mice, green screens of death, green.... oh h*ll, I can't go on.
This is just a marketing ploy to try to differentiate the manufacturer from the competition.
If you want to save energy, turn the wretched thing off
encryption with Skype telephone software... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it.
Whether it's the police or just some nosey old git (Q: how can you tell the difference?) who's eavedropping on your conversation, the point is that only the person you're talking to should be able to decrypt the data.
If the police don't like that, that can always try to outlaw it - or require that keys are made available to them.
The problem you get then is people who "spoof" an encrypted datastream by just sending random numbers (tho' not from a Microsoft source as we've recently been told) down the line. How do you know when a stream of apparently encrypted data has been decoded anyway?
There will always be a hard-core of early adopters for pretty much any tech toy. Even better if it's had reviews - but preferably good ones.
The number of people who buy a product on day #1 is largely irrelevant, that's just the fans - you can also charge them more (sorry, just had to get that in). The numbers that really count are a few months in, when the problems become known, the promised content does or does not become available and the initial euphoria wears off. I wonder how many units will still be in use and how many will be on at the back of a drawer somewhere?
The only item on the list that will affect the vast majority (including the 1/3rd of the population that has no electricity) is universal water. Even that presumes there's some rainfall for the filtration to work on.
If you want major breakthroughs for the "other" 90% of the world they'll have to cost less than $10 to the end-user.
When all these pundits (and their audiences) start thinking in those terms, that'll be a real breakthrough
P.S. My suggestion for the list would be a viable neural interface.
When we write online, most people keep it fairly short - partly because their readers won;t read past the first paragraph (and they want to get a lot of stuff in) and partly because writing is quite slow - especially when you have to think, write, re-read, correct and then commit.
This is in contrast to spoken communication, which is much easier to assimilate and can therefore go on for longer. It also contains more emotion than simple writing, so the actual words are less important than the intonation - which is almost completely missing from text.
People frequently mistake short comments for either sarcasm or impatience and this gives the impression that written communication (esp. in email, netnews) that the writer does not respect the audience.
I beleive this is incorrect, when I insult someone they will be left in no doubt they have been insulted. I think over time, most people will come to realise the difference between rudeness and terseness. There will always be a few however, who take exception at everything. there's no helping these individuals.
Physically losing a laptop, is not in itself a crime. The negligence aspect of containing confidential data on an unsecured device is what turns stupidity into an offence. A logical extension would be to view a lack of "protection" to internet attacks/theft in a similar way.
If a PC (or laptop, or a server)that holds confidential data is audited and shown to be vulnerable to external attack, then this is just as negligent as leaving unprotected data open to theft and should be treated in the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
some research departments simply have too much spare money
So even staying at home won't make you safe
We already have earthman. It's just that none of them are on your planet
The best thing to do with it would be to make bags that you can use to contain an explosive device rather than try to protect people with it.
Afterthought: if it's so tough, how do you machine it?
The key difference is that most criminals are stupid, while most consultants are much more intelligent. I would suggest that for a given IQ (or however you want to measure intelligence) the balance is far more in favour of the criminal than an equally IQ-endowed consultant.
The reason being that there are more opportunities to get money from a criminal activity than from a security consultancy activity and it will always be easier to exploit a weakness than to fix it.
So why aren't there more super-villains?
Because it's not about the money, it's about the life-style. No really intelligent person would want to spend the rest of their life looking over their shoulder. Neither would they be dumb enough to think they had committed the perfect (i.e. untraceable) crime
The obsession stems from the "great" tradition of british tabloid journalism. Essentially they build up a person or an institution and then knock them down. If one tabloid builds 'em up, the rest just love to criticise or undermine them. It's basically just a game between a group of immature personalities (I nearly said "journalists") that a group of the public play along with.
Some El Reg. writers have adopted this style (without realising that the tabloid audience doesn't read their publication), probably because they've never read a proper newspaper and don't know any better.
We will have become used to having a small number of portals that provide the vast majority of the data we will be allowed to access (for a fee, of course) and security will have become the problem of these portals.
Users simply won't have much incentive to surf freely from site to site as there will be so little free data available. Therefore the sort of security issues we have today will have gone away. The problem in the future will be for providers (that's you amd me bloggers and other website owners) to prove to the portals that they are clean and meet the standards of the day.
This is just word-inflation. in the same way that children nowadays "need" a chocolate bar.
In business, the best way to see if someone really "needs" something is to see how much hassle they're willing to suffer to get it. For example, if they need a $1000 product, then I'd need a 20 page justification. If they need to attend a conference in 'Vegas, I need them to work weekends to catch-up the time etc. You get the idea.
All that remains is to find the tapes ...
Or, depending on how the project lead is viewed in the company, this could be the fastest promotion you'll ever get.
Before you talk to anyone about this, do some discrete research about who might be sympathetic to your situation, who the lead's enemies are and think about just how much politics you want to get involved in
To summarise your position: someone in your company found some information on a forum and too advantage of it (presumbly without the authors permission). You are asking for advice on a forum and are hoping to take advantage of it, too.
Are you planning to get the permission of whoever's advice you use, before you use it?
P.S. You have my permission to use this post in your considerations.
heh, try drawing a picture with a mouse!
In practice anything that involves waving your arms around, a la Minority report will be the fastest way to get tired arms ever invented. So that's the Reactible, Multi-touch and Microsoft surface out of the running. Imaging doing that for an 8 hour shift in your datacentre. Completely impractical, but like flying cars, looks great to the uninformed.
Let's face it, typing is quicker than mousing - you've got 110 keys at your disposal instead of just 2 (or up to 5 - wow wee!!!) and the limitation is the number you can press is limited by the numberof fingers you can manipulate at once - not the numebr of things you can press. Just try writing a letter by mouse clicks. Typing is even quicker than speaking - especially when you have to go back and change the phonetically (sorry fonetically) spelled words that come out.
Personally, all I want from a UI is one that doesn't steal focus from my window to pop-up a "Shall I delete all your files Y / n" just when I think I'm, going to hit in a text window. It should keep the clutter off my screen and just show me the stuff I want. Aeroglass is nowhere near this (and probably going in the wrong direction anyway - far too complicated). Let's just keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
How long? let's see. if they're "developing" it now, say 3 years until it's in production and another year until it's at the major points of entry. But you've got to cover all the points of entry - sea, air(freight), land via Canada and Mexico. Make that about 10,000 PoE in all, so you're talking about another couple of years at least. That means about 6 years or until the beginning of 2014 to get a few grapefruit sized pieces of metal across the border.
Really bad thought: maybe it would be easier to get material that's already in US stockpiles - what use are border checks then?
As it is, no operating system has ever run faster than it's predecessor on the same hardware. Whether you're talking OS/360 (what's that grandad?), VMS, BSD/Sys5 Unixes, probably even linuxes - tho' there are so many variants, it's impossible to know for all of them.
If you already have a PC, you'll run XP (or in my case W2K SP4) 'cos it just works. If you buy a new PC, you'll run Vista.
That's basically it. A few people will have bought a Vista upgrade - maybe they're ahppy with it, maybe not. If not, they'll either live with it or revert. It's not to do with competition, it's to do with a saturated market.
The only story here is: people sometimes buy new PCs.
Until there is a killer app that only runs on Vista, I can't see why most people whould make the change.
If you simply can't hold it in, at least make sure that no individuals or organisations can be identified.
On a resume, or in an interview, the potential employer is interested in what you can do for them, not your personal blog or your views on personal/irrelevant topics (unless they would be incompatible with the position you are interviewing for).
As a consequence, I can see almost no situations where an employee can write about their current or past work in a way that will not compromise their future employment prospects - leave online links out of your CV
Absolutley not. I interview a *lot* of people and I have never seen a CV (resume) that lists any nicknames, alter-egos, aliases or anything that would point to the candidate having any kind of online presence. It woud probably count against them if they thought this was important.
I certainly would never follow up any links to online data in a CV.
A lot of countries have anti-discrimination laws. You would be on very sticky ground if you rejected a candidate on the grounds of information you had gleaned online (esp. if it was related to a class of discrimination). For instance if someone's online diary said "I plan to start a family in a year or two" You could not ask this type of question in an interview and if you rejected them by knowing that this was their intention you could end up being sued.
BTW, I'm assuming UK law here.
No, it's a training "dummy" that was used by the RAF until they had them taken away in the 90's. Now the only nukes the brits have are in trident submarines, which they have to buy from the americans.
let's have green CPU fans, green memory, green chassis (made from wood?), green power plugs, green keyboards, green mice, green screens of death, green .... oh h*ll, I can't go on.
This is just a marketing ploy to try to differentiate the manufacturer from the competition.
If you want to save energy, turn the wretched thing off
Whether it's the police or just some nosey old git (Q: how can you tell the difference?) who's eavedropping on your conversation, the point is that only the person you're talking to should be able to decrypt the data.
If the police don't like that, that can always try to outlaw it - or require that keys are made available to them.
The problem you get then is people who "spoof" an encrypted datastream by just sending random numbers (tho' not from a Microsoft source as we've recently been told) down the line.
How do you know when a stream of apparently encrypted data has been decoded anyway?
The number of people who buy a product on day #1 is largely irrelevant, that's just the fans - you can also charge them more (sorry, just had to get that in). The numbers that really count are a few months in, when the problems become known, the promised content does or does not become available and the initial euphoria wears off. I wonder how many units will still be in use and how many will be on at the back of a drawer somewhere?
If you want major breakthroughs for the "other" 90% of the world they'll have to cost less than $10 to the end-user.
When all these pundits (and their audiences) start thinking in those terms, that'll be a real breakthrough
P.S. My suggestion for the list would be a viable neural interface.
This is in contrast to spoken communication, which is much easier to assimilate and can therefore go on for longer. It also contains more emotion than simple writing, so the actual words are less important than the intonation - which is almost completely missing from text.
People frequently mistake short comments for either sarcasm or impatience and this gives the impression that written communication (esp. in email, netnews) that the writer does not respect the audience.
I beleive this is incorrect, when I insult someone they will be left in no doubt they have been insulted. I think over time, most people will come to realise the difference between rudeness and terseness. There will always be a few however, who take exception at everything. there's no helping these individuals.
If a PC (or laptop, or a server)that holds confidential data is audited and shown to be vulnerable to external attack, then this is just as negligent as leaving unprotected data open to theft and should be treated in the same way.